ICE to Pay Damages

ICE, the power and light monopoly, has bowed to the inevitable and agreed to pay damages to landowners on the slopes above the reservoir behind the newly opened Los Diquis hydroelectric dam, reported the daily paper Al Dia.

At first, the government-owned company denied that filling the reservoir in the past four months was responsible for deep cracks appearing in the area on the edge of the reservoir but only two days after a study by geologists, agreed to pay up.

The geologists confirmed what landowners had previously claimed -- that filling the Los Diquis dam basin undermined a 40-year-old site of previous landslides that had been stabilized during four decades.

Seven homes were destroyed or heavily damaged by the cracks that had begun to appear only four months ago as the basin filled with water. (See previous articles.)

ICE engineers had blithely told the alarmed residents to fill the cracks with clay, despite the fact that the cracks appeared under some homes. For some of the residents, such an option was laughable and they will have to construct new dwellings on a different site.

Often, especially during the rainy season, catastrophic landslides happen due to unstable tropical soil, deforestation, erosion from denuded areas prepared for cultivation or undermining by rivers. But these residents had no reason to suspect the the reservoir would break the 40-year hiatus of slippage.

So reservoirs are not always to blame. The heaviest rains of the season are expected in October, as was shown Tuesday when three homes were damaged by a sizable landslide at Tranquerrias de Tabarca, two kilometers from the San Gabriel section of the mountainside town of Aserri south of Desamparados.

No injuries or deaths were reported but this is not always the case with landslides -- an avalanche on the mountain above the posh western San Jose suburb of Escazu last rainy season killed several people and buried homes under tons of mud and rocks.